


'til the sun blows up

by tezzaract



Category: Adventure Time
Genre: Bad Ending, F/M, Gen, hey it only took betty a few billion years to stop being so shitty about ice king
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-06
Updated: 2018-08-06
Packaged: 2019-06-22 19:06:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15588684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tezzaract/pseuds/tezzaract
Summary: in the episode betty, death told simon he would be the ice king until the sun blew up.





	'til the sun blows up

Five billion, twenty-four million, six-hundred-and-three thousand, two-hundred and fifty-four years. Or sixty billion, two hundred-and-ninety-five million, two hundred-and-thirty-nine thousand and forty-eight months. Or one trillion, eight-hundred-and-twenty-eight billion, nine-hundred-and-fifty-five million, five-hundred-and-eighty-four thousand, four hundred and fifty-six days. This was how long it had been since Betty Grof had first arrived in the future.

Her life before then could hardly be considered much else than a blip on the radar, a happy few moments before the rest of eternity. Truth be told, she hardly remembered a thing from back then. What knowledge she had of life before the First Mushroom War (because of course it was only the first, people never bothered to learn from their predecessors mistakes, why would they) was muddied, blurred, between her own faded memories and mixed-up interpretations of the civilizations subsequent.

Her age multiplied by a hundred, then _a thousand,_ then _a_ _million._ New civilizations had risen and fallen in the blink of an eye, countless generations passing in the time it took her to realize the first of them had even be _born._ She saw countless cultures make the same progress, the same mistakes. She’d even been regarded as a goddess at one point – that had been pretty fun.

And he was still the same.  
  


The earth was but a scorched and blackened husk of its former self, surface scarred and pockmarked from eons of destruction, any and all valuable resources razed from the land. It was almost impossible to think that this that had once been home to such a wide variety of lifeforms. All intelligent life had abandoned the planet millennia ago, and what wasn’t intelligent (besides Ice King and herself, _ ha ha _ ) had become all but ashes in the wind. Not a trace was left of  _ anything _ on the once-grand once-blue blue planet. Even the eldritch denizens of the Spirit Realm were few-and-far-between, now. It was just a empty, burning hunk of rock floating through space, and nothing more..

And he was still the same.  
  


Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale. The sweltering, oxygen-less air burned her lungs with every breath she took, but that was automatic biological functions for you. Couldn’t turn them off, even if you wanted to. And  _ oh,  _ how she  _ wanted _ to. But all these billions of years alive was more than enough to teach her; life wasn’t _ fair _ like that.

She’d  _ tried, _ of course. She’d tried more times than she could count, in more ways than she could name. Hitting your breaking point lost its novelty after the first few hundred times. Didn’t stop it from still happening. Didn’t stop her from still trying. Didn’t stop it from never working.

No matter what she tried, it wasn’t permanent. It never was. Fun fact: total immortality was a total _ bitch. _ Every time, every single fucking time, her wounds would vanish, her illnesses would be cured, and she’d get right back up, good as new.  _ Physically _ fit but mentally _ broken _ . Trapped,  _ never _ to leave this  _ unending living hell _ . All because, well, death wasn’t _ fair  _ like that.

And he was still the same.  
  


The earth was nearing its final hours now, and the temperature was climbing by the thousands every minute. By all rights, she ought to be nothing but another pile of ash amongst all these others. But hey, she hadn’t learned that fire-protection spell all those aeons ago just to let it go to waste. 

A pitifully small dome of ice was on the horizon, and she stops to stare at it, just for a moment. She watched on as the dome near-instantly boiled away, only for the steam to be pulled back in place, re-solidifying just as fast. It was incredible, really. How, even in this impossible heat, he’d still managed to pull together enough magic to make a cute little frozen bunker, just enough to keep him going. Guess that blasted crown was good for one thing. She stands there, thinking, just thinking, and vanishes with a shower of rainbow sparks.

When one had been around for as long as she had, and when nothing at all ever changed in your life, it was hard to tell how many days, weeks,  _ months, years, centuries, millennia _ had passed since they’d last seen each-other.  _ Certainly _ long enough for him to _ forget  _ her again. She reappears in the dome.

And he was still the same.

 

She cleared her throat, trying to get his attention, but he didn’t react. Who knew if he even realized someone was there was there? Isolation hadn’t done much to help his mental state, it seemed. But then again, he’d always been a bit odd since Marceline passed, all those years ago, hadn’t he. A little less lucid (when was he ever), a little less him (that had been lost long before she died), but always, always, still the same. She doubted he even remembered the girl, now. “Hey,” she murmurs, voice croaky and hoarse, dried out and red-raw from the unending heat and weak from disuse. “Don’t start the party without me.”

He jumps, face white with shock at the sight of her. Clearly he hadn’t been expecting any visitors today. Who would? “Heyyyyy, it’s, uh-” His overgrown brows furrowed, and he looked like he was thinking hard. “…I don’t know your name. Sorry.”

“It’s fine.” She was used to that sort of thing by now. That cycle of learning and forgetting, learning and forgetting, over and over and over… It was just a fact of life to her, now.. Just another painful, _ rotting, festering  _ wound on her soul, as red-raw as the day it first appeared. Just another fact of life.

 

“Warm day today, huh?”

A faint smile played across her lips, and she couldn’t help but roll her eyes. “You could say that again.”

“Warm day today, huh?”

That actually gets a laugh out of her, as short-lived as it was. But she goes quiet again, staring at the melting wall across from them with a pensive look on her face.

 

“Simon, I’m… I’m so sorry,” she starts. She’d worked out long ago that the two of them were cursed. Not in the traditional sense (though that was true, too), but in the sense that it seemed as though the universe’s  _ sole purpose _ was to spit on their entire existence. It certainly  _ felt  _ like that.  Countless years she had spent, trying, and _ trying, _ and _ trying _ , desperately looking for some sort of lead, some small clue. _ Something  _ that could provide hope for him, anything. But she’d never found it. And now, here they were, just the two of them at the end of the world with nothing left to live for, all because she just hadn’t been smart enough to find the answer. She’d had literally  _ all the time in the world _ , and she’d  _ squandered _ it on wild goose-chases and dead-ends and making  _ every mistake  _ that was humanly possible.  _ Sorry _ just wasn’t a strong enough word for how she was feeling right now. There probably wasn’t a word in  _ all of existence  _ that could describe how she was feeling right now.

_Failure._ That was it, that was the right word for her. A failure. Probably the most spectacular, colossal failure in the history of life itself. _Five billion_ _fucking years_ and she’d never found _anything_ that worked, she’d never had anything _close_ to a breakthrough. She was a _failure._

But of course, he didn’t know that. He had no idea. He never did.  _ So _ many times she’d come back to him, re-introduced herself, forced herself to befriend him, explained to him what she was doing, sometimes fell back in love, sometimes not, so-on so forth. But eventually it would always be too painful to carry on, and she would leave again, and he would forget her again, and the whole process would restart, all over again.

And  _ every _ time, every fucking time, he was still the same.

 

“I dunno what you’re so sorry about, lady. But, uh, it’s fine? I guess?”

She grits her teeth, fists balling as she goes to protest.  _ It’s not _ , she wants to say. _ It’s not fine, it’s never fine.  _ Why would this ever be fine? She had so much she wanted to say, so, so much he needed to hear, but she couldn’t. He wouldn’t. There wasn’t enough time left, not in the world, not in the universe. There was just too much.

So this would have to do.

She wraps her arms around him, the first embrace they’ve shared in twelve million, six-hundred-and-ninety-three thousand, two-hundred-and-forty-seven years. She’d missed it. “Thank you,” she tells him, and nothing more.

 

And the sun engulfs the earth.

**Author's Note:**

> this idea had been kicking around in my google docs for over a year now and i finally got off my ass and wrote it  
> tbh it goes against like 90% of my headcanons re: how the simon and betty plotline will end and how betty's potential immortality works but i thought it was a neat idea anyway so ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯  
> check out my blog at tezza-ract.tumblr.com


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